During the wee hours of the morning on March 22, anyone who happened to be around the White House grounds saw this scene:
Of course a lot of crazed things are happening inside and outside the White House, and this, depending on your point-of-view, is one of them. What we see here is a replica of the statue of Christopher Columbus that was tossed into the Inner Harbor in Baltimore in 2020 during July 4 protests. Trump issued a statement that Columbus “was the original American hero and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the Earth” while White House spokesman Davis Ingle proclaimed that "In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero, and President Trump will ensure that he is honored as such for generations to come."
The president added that he was “truly honored that this magnificent statue will now sit on the grounds of the White House”. The White House added on a post on X that Columbus was a “hero” and that Trump would ensure he was “honored as such for generations to come.”
First off, Columbus was not an "American," but an Italian working for Spain. He certainly wasn't a "visionary, and never set foot in what it is now the United States. There are those who may quibble about whether or not the Norse actually traveled the 900 miles southward from Newfoundland to what is U.S. territory (seeds supposedly not native to Newfoundland may have actually been brought there by the indigenous people who had lived there for thousands of years), but the first evidence of landfall and colonization in this country by Europeans was by Juan Ponce de León in Florida in 1513.
The first landing and colonization on the west coast by Europeans was also by the Spanish, in 1542 with the founding of Alta California. The first French arrival in the "new world" was predictably headed by another Italian mariner, Giovanni da Verrazzano, in 1524, and the English did not “discover” United States territory until 1579—and that was when Frances Drake sailed up the west coast; it wasn’t until 1584 that the English actually made a landfall on the east coast.
It is interesting to note that Columbus to his dying day refused to admit that he had misled the Spanish monarch and the investors in his voyage to discover a faster route to The Indies (China, India) for economic exploitation. Right up until his death in 1506 he insisted that he had not made a “mistake” and that he had landed on the eastern fringes of “The Indies” and that China and India were just around the corner.
In fact no one had any clue that they actually found a “new world” until Vasco Nunez de Balboa “discovered” a vast sea he had heard rumors about from the natives, and saw it with his own eyes after a torturous crossing of what is today Panama. It was only then, almost a decade after Columbus’ death, that there came the idea that these “explorers” seeking a quicker route to exploit the resources of China and India had actually happened upon a previously unknown land between Europe and “The Indies.”
As for Columbus’ status as a “hero” we should “honor,” his contemporary, Bartolomé de Las Casas, had a different view of him. De Las Casas himself had briefly owned as slaves indigenous inhabitants, but after viewing how the “devout Christian” Columbus was running things as governor of Hispaniola, he looked inward and decided to become a Dominican friar, defending the rights of the indigenous people who were being killed off by European diseases, the slave labor they were compelled to do and by plain, ordinary methods:
He observed that the European invaders that Columbus brought with him employed "the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty" and that "my eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write."
He went on to say that
The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed. . . . Their insatiable greed and overweening ambition know no bounds; the land is fertile and rich, the inhabitants simple, forbearing and submissive. The Spaniards have shown not the slightest consideration for these people, treating them (and I speak from first-hand experience, having been there from the outset) not as brute animals - indeed, I would to God they had done and had shown them the consideration they afford their animals –so much as piles of dung in the middle of the road. They have had as little concern for their souls as for their bodies, all the millions that perished having gone to their deaths with no knowledge of God and without the benefit of the Sacraments.
One fact in all this is widely known and beyond dispute, for even the tyrannical murderers themselves acknowledge the truth of it: the indigenous peoples never did the Europeans any harm whatever; on the contrary, they believed them to have descended from the heavens, at least until they or their fellow citizens had tasted, at the hands of these oppressors, a diet of robbery, murder, violence, and all other manner of trials and tribulations.
Of course de Las Casas was a “man of his times” and he suggested the importation of African “labor” because African slaves were made of “hardier” material (since they were less susceptible to the diseases that Europeans had brought with them), although he later regretted this view as a “grave mistake” since it contradicted his Christian morality about human rights.
Of course indigenous peoples have continued to be the prey of the descendants of the Euro-elites, forced to occupy the lowest rungs of society and the frequent subject of human rights violations. We learn here 1 that Ecuador’s Trumpist president, Daniel Noboa, has used his “war on crime” as an excuse to extend his campaign to terrorize and disenfranchise the indigenous population, characterizing their protest campaigns against him as “terrorism.”
Not surprisingly this all ties into Kristi Noem’s new “job,” as “special envoy” of “The Shield of the Americas,” which we note here...
...that the principle participants are all right-wing governments groveling before Trump for “favors,” and at least one of them received a “favor” in the form of $40 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to help in his re-election bid. Trump is clearly dividing Latin America into “friends” and “enemies” based on political ideological lines. According to The Hill, “The Shield of the Americas will be guided by the president’s foreign policy initiatives dubbed the ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ fashioned after the Monroe Doctrine."
The administration has described the doctrine as "enlisting ‘established friends’ in the Western Hemisphere to pursue U.S. aims and expanding ties by ‘cultivating and strengthening new partners’” apparently based on sharing the same fascist political and social ideology. Brazil might have become part of this gang had Jair Bolsonaro been successful in his attempt at a coup d'état to overturn his 2022 election loss in which he was clearly influenced by Trump's attempt at a coup in 2020. Unlike Trump, Bolsonaro was convicted of treason against democracy, and sentenced to 27 years in prison, although it was "reduced" to "house arrest" for "health reasons."
Of course the Monroe-now-Donroe-Doctrine has more in common with Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” policy in Latin America than FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy." Gen. Smedley Butler’s view of the U.S. military’s actual “role” in U.S. foreign policy remains largely true in the era of boat strike war criminality, with the most recent strike in the Caribbean bringing the murder toll to 163:
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street…I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.
As we see today, the U.S. military in taking part in what are essentially war crimes in Latin America underscores that little has changed since Butler’s time. And now we see as Noem’s first action as “special envoy” is the (aptly-named) “Operation Total Extermination.” According to USA Today,
Ecuador’s defense ministry on March 6 said Operation Total Extermination included aerial bombardment in the province of Sucumbios, which sits in the country's northeastern corner, on the border with Colombia. Ecuadoran officials said the operation, conducted with U.S. intelligence, destroyed a hideout for a Colombian drug trafficking group.
Residents of San Martin, the farming village of about 27 families in Sucumbios, told USA TODAY that the operation, which took place March 1-6, didn’t target drug traffickers. Instead, they said military personnel destroyed farms. Detained local workers have told a United Nations human rights group that Ecuadoran soldiers tortured them.
Must be using that outdated "AI" again for that "intelligence." The New York Times followed this up with a report that Hegseth boasted in his usual bloodlustful way that “We are bombing Narco Terrorists on land,” while his spokesperson added that it was a “successful operation against a narco-terrorist supply complex” and “This operation demonstrates the power of coordinated action and sends a clear message: narco-terrorist networks will not find refuge in our hemisphere.”
Just one problem: Reporters found no evidence at the strike scene that suggested that there was any “narco-terrorist” activity going on there, which was vehemently denied by local residents. Reporters stated that they saw “no sign of drug production or trafficking,” but “instead reporting dead animals, a charred lemon tree, and an avocado tree," and the bombing run appears to have hit "a farm, killing chickens and other livestock," according to the Times, as seen in this image of a farmer scrutinizing the results of the attack:
“'It’s an outrage' according to the farm’s owner, Miguel, who told the Times 'It’s a lie that 50 people trained here. Where are they going to train? Out here in the open? There’s no logic.'” The community of San Martin in Ecuador is of course populated mainly by the indigenous people that Noboa is calling “criminals” and “terrorists.” much as his benefactor Trump does hard-working indigenous immigrants his ICE thugs are rounding up simply because Trump and Miller think they are “ugly.”
It’s all part of the blame-brown-skinned-people game of Trump when he first walked down his golden whatever in the Trump Tower back in 2015. We know that those little boats being blasted out of the water in the Caribbean are not sending drugs to U.S., let alone the ridiculous claim that they are murdering half the U.S. population. There are no “cartels” in Colombia anymore, just the “underground” operation that replaced them after the previous “war on drugs,” that did not address drug use in this country (well, there was Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, which most drug users just gave her the “bird”), and I’ve shared this image before of drug dealing happening right in front of a downtown building I used to work in:
This story 2 points out that not only is all the focus on “cartels” and targeting dealers on the streets who are not in fact in “business” to kill their customers is in many ways "counterproductive," it is only addressing half the problem, the other half being of course illegal drug use, and in fact is making the situation even more “lethal” for drug users by removing “trusted” dealers and suppliers who are “friends” or “members of the community,” instead driving business “underground” where the supplier could be selling anything.
Nevertheless, I still believe that personal responsibility, rather than simply treating users like “victims,” is ignored in order to scapegoat brown-skinned immigrants and justify ICE thuggery and Hegseth's psychopathy. After all, there would be no "business" if there were no "customers." And as we can see, Trump has more in common with Columbus than even his uneducated self knows.
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